Woman of Valor by Ellen Chesler

Author:Ellen Chesler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1992-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Bound for Bombay, Margaret departed New York via ship in October of 1935, laden with a large inventory of medical supplies and educational tools, including a demonstration film and fifty contraptions called gynaeplaques, which Hannah Stone used to instruct women at the clinic in New York. These life-sized, three-dimensional models of the female pelvis came apart to reveal the organs of the reproductive tract like pieces of a puzzle. They remained in use in India for years thereafter in the scattered villages Margaret visited, another anonymous gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who at her personal request had donated the money to pay for them.

The main purpose of this trip, however, was to mobilize opinion, not to modify behavior, and the most important item in Margaret’s cargo was the portable typewriter she carried everywhere, along with a carefully prepared press list and an ample stock of attractive photographs of herself for reproduction. Advised that it would be necessary to initiate and manage her own publicity, Margaret took along a young reporter from Pittsburgh by the name of Anna Jane Phillips, who, in turn, wrote daily releases for the local papers and wire services and kept a running diary of the trip that was reproduced in installments and sent home with great fanfare to American birth control supporters. Wherever Margaret went during her stay of several months, prominent coverage was generated in the local English language press and a steady stream of stories ran in American newspapers as well.10

This extraordinary propaganda machine first got underway during a stopover in London, where Margaret was toasted by H. G. Wells at yet another fund-raising dinner. Wells was most gracious on this occasion. “Alexander the Great changed a few boundaries and killed a certain number of men,” he said, “but he made no lasting change in civilization. Both he and Napoleon were forced into fame by circumstances outside themselves and by currents of the time, but Margaret Sanger made currents and circumstances. When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history, and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.”

While in London, Margaret also had the good fortune to meet with Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru, who had recently been released from a four-year prison sentence in connection with his agitation for home rule. Already considered the likely successor to Gandhi in the movement for independence, Nehru, by contrast to his mentor, possessed an aristocratic British education and a decidedly modern outlook. In town to select a school for his seventeen-year-old daughter and future successor as prime minister, Indira Gandhi, he enthusiastically endorsed the dissemination of birth control in India.11

India’s population was growing at an astonishing rate of nearly 10 percent per decade, with 370 million people accounted for in the 1931 census. The adverse economic consequences of this demographic surge were severe. Ninety-five percent of the country’s working population earned less than five cents a day, scarcely enough to provide one full meal, and the accelerating dislocation of peasants from

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